A Journalist Glimpses the Tools of an Artist’s Creativity

SEATTLE — Trying to peer inside the mind and world of an artist, hoping for a glimpse into the mixture of experience and inspiration that led to a particular act of creation, is an exercise that nonartists have attempted for centuries.

That was not my goal in trying to capture the world of Dale Chihuly, the globally renowned glass artist who is treading down a road of age, infirmity and legal challenge as he approaches his 76th birthday. As an art lover with no other qualifications but my own eye for what I like or don’t, I felt it would be presumptuous of me to even try to come to terms with Mr. Chihuly’s art in all its gloriously wild and inventive flights of color and form.

And yet, in circling around and through Mr. Chihuly’s world using the tools of a national correspondent — interviewing him, spending time inside his studio and speaking with people who have known him for decades — I sometimes experienced a burst of insight into what makes for success in his world. Hard work, planning and execution, I came to see — the grunt work of creation — can be as important as the vision behind the art.

But the physical and mental ability to do that work was also part of the story. Mr. Chihuly lost vision in one eye in a 1976 car crash. A shoulder injury from a bodysurfing accident made glassblowing, with its heavy pipes, impossible to do. He suffers from bipolar disorder, marked by swings of elation and depression. Earlier this year, a former contractor sued Mr. Chihuly and his wife, Leslie, who is the president and chief executive of Chihuly Studio, saying that health, age and incapacity were keeping Mr. Chihuly off the art floor. The former contractor, Michael Moi, said in the suit that he did paintings for which he was never properly credited or compensated. The Chihulys have filed a countersuit, saying Mr. Moi is out for money he didn’t earn.

So I looked for clues to how Mr. Chihuly works, or doesn’t.

At the Pilchuck Glass School, of which Mr. Chihuly was a co-founder in the early 1970s north of Seattle, I asked the mostly college-aged students about him: What did they see when they watched him work at the school recently? Some saw a kind of grandfather figure, while others said their awe toward him was still fresh. Several were struck by how he stood back and told others what he wanted. Mr. Chihuly’s visit never made it into my article, but it informed my thinking and reporting.

“He seemed sort of like a movie director,” one student told me.

I witnessed Mr. Chihuly working in his studio on the day of my interview with him. He stood at a half-finished glass panel, looking like an ordinary guy with an eyepatch and paint-spattered shoes. Then, as though a switch had been hit, he suddenly went into artist mode — focused and fast with brush strokes that swirled paint in an arc across the screen that would later be fired and sealed. Just as abruptly, he was back to being a 75-year-old man in his workshop, proudly showing me around.

I have to admit that, because his mental condition was central to the lawsuit against him and the article I was writing, I felt the need to test him a little. So as we were walking out of the paintshop toward his office to continue our interview, I dropped a name: Jeffrey Beers, who had studied glass blowing under Mr. Chihuly at the Rhode Island School of Design in the early 1970s. I had interviewed Mr. Beers, now an architect, and planned to quote him in my article.

“Jeffrey Beers! God, I haven’t heard that name in a long time,” Mr. Chihuly said over his shoulder. “A nice guy.”

Mr. Chihuly continued into his office. He’d passed the test.

In the end I probably got no closer to understanding art. But I felt I had come to better understand the machine behind the making of art, and glimpsed the dynamics and deep conflicts that swirl around what finally gets set before the world to judge.